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I’m probably taking the bait here, but for the non-Americans who may read this, there’s a patriotic phrase that mentions “baseball and apple pie” (sometimes adding “motherhood”) that became an iconic car advertisement lyric in the 1970’s: “Baseball, Hot Dogs, Apple Pie and Chevrolet”.

Sorry to continue the grief. We prefer the capitalized form, “Stan” (it’s named after Stanislaw Ulam). We dislike the all-caps form, “STAN”, because people assume it’s an acronym and try to figure out what it means.

To what does the word “Stan” refer? Not sure. It’s a probabilistic programming language and a math library on which the language depends, but it’s also an open-source stats project, interfaces in various languages, and then abstractions on top of that like RStanArm and visualization tools like ShinyStan that don’t technically even depend on those other things called “Stan”.

Stan is not a good name, but the thing that really gets me is that you guys knew that and went with it anyway! And that’s fine. “The great language with a lousy name”, well why not, it’s not like the name is the most important thing in the world.